Recent advancements in network telephony applications have created a plurality of possibilities for enhancements to services involving data connections and forms of data that can be carried over communication links. Web-based communication applications make it possible for users to access web-sites, click on a link, and establish a voice over an internet-protocol telephone call from the user's phone or computer to a recipient's phone or computer. Currently, by enabling a web-based telephony application to receive URL's, a user now has the option to make a web-based telephony call to another telephone number or to a skill set, by specifying the phone number in a URL containing specified information. For example, this information can be time information for automatically initiating a telephone call, or for feature keys on a user's telephone terminal to be programmed so that, when activated at a particular time, a specific call is initiated.
Traditionally, terminals for transmitting and receiving the calls have decided the nature of the proposed communication connection and whether to establish a circuit-switched connection or packet-switched connection for carrying the data during the communication. Packet-switched connections are a relatively new advancement and allow data of more than one form to be carried over a communications link, such as voice and video data being carried on a communications link simultaneously.
Accordingly, users are now able to connect to networks or web-routing services through telephony applications to initiate calls, manually or automatically, and to acquire information from the network that is relevant to the user's call or needed in the user's communication.
Network channels and availability for information searches that can be performed in real-time by a user and that can provide contact information relevant to the user's call are an important aspect that is needed. In addition, current users must perform information searches each time the information changes or is required.
A need exists for a way to collect or cache into a data store all previous information interactions that a user has exchanged through network using either conventional telephones or web-based telephones.
A need exists for an ability to communicate information between a point of origination to a point of destination by input from a user in such forms as typed-text, voice, and combinations thereof and to produce this information for communication by user-initiated queries using keywords, elaborated natural language, etc., in a manner such that the information can be uniquely associated to a user by transactions, account numbers, tickets, or other user-selected attributes.
The present embodiments address these needs.